High Order Book Orientation

As applied to The 27th Annual African Hippopotamus Race, chapter 6, Sebastian

• Children need to be made aware of how the story is written, i.e. the literate language features of the text. We start teaching about this in High Order Book Orientation.

• In high order book orientation, we are
  - teaching children to read the text with comprehension
  - giving the children such deep understanding of how the text is written that they will learn to write like the author
  - teaching the children that authors make choices about how to write.

• In addition, we are teaching the children how to talk about written language.

Preparation: Before we do the high order book orientation:-

- we work out what we need/want to talk about
- we enlarge the text for class use, either on cardboard or on an overhead transparency

These notes are in two parts. 1. Under the heading WHAT WE WILL TALK ABOUT we have provided a guide to what we think we need to talk about in this passage. 2. Under the heading WHAT WE MIGHT SAY we have provided an imaginary high order book orientation to show how what we need to talk about becomes actual lessons. You might like to read each of the two parts side by side. Giving the lessons Note that we don't say everything that we might in the first High Order Book Orientation. In scaffolding, one does not overwhelm with the amount of information. Later conversations allow us to address more. The Questioning style of: Preformulation Question Response Reconceptualisation is used throughout. We read the section of text we are talking about before we prepare for the question. We use the Preformulation to give only the amount of information necessary to ensure children can read the text. We use the Reconceptualisation to add one extra bit of information. When we return the next time, children will volunteer and talk about what we told them on the previous day. We then use Reconceptualisation to add another piece of information. Some of the information listed in What We Might Say might not be talked about until the Transformation. In this part of the sequence we expect the students to answer in the words of the text. We continue to ask more than one volunteer to answer. Next Page:- What We Will Talk About